Lawmakers Miss the Boat!

The recent passage
of a resolution in the State of Louisiana (US) House of Representatives
earned more notoriety for what it left out than for what it actually said.

Rep.
Sharon Broome’s original draft of House Concurrent Resolution 74, which
passed the House Education Committee on a 9-5 vote, condemned the racist
ideology of Darwinian evolution, that certain “races” of humans have “evolved”
to a higher level than others.1 Yet the
version of the resolution that was passed by the entire House (May 8,
2001) had all references to Charles Darwin and Darwinism removed by amendment
(which passed 65-28). The final version did nothing more than condemn
racism in general.2

As honorable as a
general condemnation of racism appears to be, the lawmakers who amended
the resolution revealed their own ideological biases. Rather than admit
the undeniable historical facts that Ernst Haeckel, Thomas Huxley, and
other evolutionists used Darwinian teaching to promote their racist philosophies,
which in turn directly influenced the thinking of Adolph Hitler, the legislators
admitted their own bias for the religion of evolutionism.

Even the secular media
picked up on this irony. A local editorialist observed:

“Our
legislators missed the boat and took all references to Darwinism out
of the resolution, making it simply a resolution against racism.

“Either they didn’t
want to face the facts Broome sought to bring to their knowledge, or
they were so prejudiced against the only alternative teaching to evolution
(creationism) that while passing a bill [sic] denouncing racial
prejudice, they were demonstrating their own religious prejudice.” 3

This very prejudice
against addressing the many problems with Darwinian teaching led to other
typical evolutionist tactics: ad hominem attacks and straw man
arguments. These tactics also caught the notice of the editorialist:

“The resolution
was labeled as a ploy of the religious right to take the teaching of
evolution out of schools.

“The reason for
their mudslinging is clear—when you can’t argue with the facts,
sling enough mud to cover up the facts.” 3

Furthermore,
one of the evolutionist professors who opposed the resolution, Joseph
Graves, Jr of Arizona State University (US), deflected the attack away
from Darwin’s blatantly racist book The Descent of Man by merely
asserting he’d “found nothing racist in Darwin’s book On the Origin
of Species.” 4 In setting up this straw
man argument (that the claims of the inherent racism in Darwinian theory
were based solely on Origin of Species), Graves deflected the attention
away from the more substantial evidence from Darwin’s other writings.
These tactics (along with others) proved successful enough to sway the
legislators into amending the resolution to nothing more than a watered-down
condemnation of racism.

While on the one
hand it can be frustrating to see the apparent success of the evolutionists”
tactics in confusing the issues, it is encouraging on the other hand to
note that even the secular media is beginning to recognize the prejudice
and disingenuous tactics of the mainstream evolutionary community. We
can only hope that the secular media and the public continue to become
aware of these biases and tactics, so that more people will be led away
from the religion of evolutionism and back to the authority of the Word
of God, the Bible.